Dr. Happy

We spend our lives correcting ourselves, our kids, and our employees—and still we’re not happy. The answer is to try focusing on strengths rather than weaknesses.

Martin Seligman is in the garden of his Pennsylvania home, weeding. A few months earlier, he had been elected president of the American Psychological Association by the biggest margin in the group’s history. It’s 1996, and Seligman has spent months trying to decide on the direction in which he will push the APA. While he wants it to concentrate more on methods of preventing mental illness, his focus is fuzzy.

Seligman’s five-year-old daughter, Nicole, is helping him. But it’s a child’s definition of help: she throws weeds in the air, dances and sings. Seligman yells at her and she walks away, returning a few minutes later.

“Daddy, I want to talk to you,” Nikki says. “Daddy, do you remember before my fifth birthday? From when I was three until when I was five I was a whiner. I whined every day. On my fifth birthday, I decided I wasn’t going to whine anymore. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.”

The story is recounted in Seligman’s latest book, Authentic Happiness (Random House, 2002). He laughs at the memory, but he’s not belittling it. He is laughing at the life he used to lead, the one that made him one of the country’s most influential psychologists and gave him his present position as the Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. But it was the moment with Nikki that forever altered Seligman.

“Three things happened in that epiphany,” he tells AFR BOSS. “The first was I realized she was right about me. I had been a nimbus cloud, a curmudgeon. I had basically lived my life around using critical intelligence to find out everything that was wrong with everything anyone had said to me. It occurred to me – really for the first time in my life – that any success I’d had in life might have been in spite of those things. Personally, I resolved to change.

“Insight number two was that any corporation, therapy, child-rearing or endeavor that has as the base of its program correcting errors, the best it can ever get to is zero. Zero errors. But when we lie awake at night, we’re usually thinking about how to go from plus two to plus five, not from minus eight to minus three. And there was no science for that. So the notion that raising children is somehow based on reducing errors, or that getting a profitable corporation is somehow based on becoming error-free, that just wasn’t enough. My job was to take the strengths you’ve shown in life and get you to run with it, to use it as a buffer against your flaws.

“The third thing I learned was that psychology itself was unbalanced and half-baked; it was only about the negative side of life and how to undo it. What we needed was a science and a practice of creating the enabling conditions of life, not just undoing the disabling conditions of life. Those were the three things I realized at that moment and the three things that have given me my mission in life.”

That’s not to say the 63-year-old had spent the preceding decades – he earned his PhD in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967 – drifting aimlessly. His work had concentrated on the notion of positive psychology for years, highlighted by his 1990 book Learned Optimism: How to change your mind and your life (Free Press), and his criticism of what he calls “learned helplessness”. That might loosely be described as the way traditional psychology has offered people convenient excuses for their behaviour, such as blaming it on events from their childhood.

Yet Seligman, who has written more than 20 books, today is a man on a very specific mission. His website, www.authentichappiness.com, has more than 400,000 registered users globally. His work has been featured in everything from The New York Times to Time magazine. And his focus has been on examining what makes people lead fulfilling, engaging and happy lives. The result of his research has been surprising.

Root causes

First, the bad news. No one really knows why people are increasingly unhappy. Seligman says it’s not biological: in spite of pharmaceutical companies insisting depression is the result of neurochemical imbalances (some 19 million Americans suffer from clinical depression, with the antidepressant market worth $US10 billion), he says there is “no reason at all to think our genes, our hormones or our brain chemistry has changed tenfold in any era”. It’s not ecological either. As Seligman points out, the Amish – the puritanical religious denomination with a major community just 50km from his Pennsylvania home – shares his air, water and food yet has only one-tenth the general rate of depression.

So what’s to blame? Seligman breaks it down into four categories. The first is what he calls “the balance between the ‘I’ and the ‘We’”: that is, the modern world’s focus on the individual.

“The problem is when you have a very big ‘I’ and a very small ‘We’, the consolations for failure go down,” Seligman says. “So, 50 years ago or 70 years ago, our parents and grandparents tended to have larger things that they believed in than their own successes and failures. They had a belief in God, they had patriotism and a sense of nation, they had large extended families, they had communities that they were part of. Statistically, all of those things have eroded. And the downside of that is that when we fail, we have a threadbare spiritual pantry to sit in and console ourselves.”

Seligman’s second culprit is “footless self-esteem”, or the notion that it is “the job of every classroom, every psychotherapist, every parent to give their kid high self-esteem regardless of how good the kid is”. An example: in 20 years from the early 1970s, the average Scholastic Aptitude Test score (the SAT is America’s standardized college entrance exam) fell by 35 points. During the same period, the number of college-bound high school students with A or B averages rose from 28 percent to 83 percent. As Steve Salerno wrote recently in The Los Angeles Times, “society has embraced such concepts as self-esteem and confidence despite scant evidence that they facilitate positive outcomes”.

“Even in its less extreme manifestations, confidence may easily be expressed in the kind of braggadocio – ‘I’m fine just the way I am, thank you’ – that stunts growth, yielding chronic failure,” says Salerno, author of SHAM: How the gurus of the self-help movement make us helpless (Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2005).

Seligman’s third category is victimology, or the tendency to blame external factors for personal failures. “One of my students fell asleep in class recently and came to me and said, “I’m sorry Dr Seligman, I’m a victim of ADHD’,” he says, referring to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. “The increasing rate at which we blame external things for our own failures, while I think it increases self-esteem, is a formula for learned helplessness.”

The final category is the most important: the actual components of happiness. Seligman identifies three, and the first is readily apparent to anyone who has tried shopping to cheer up – it is called the “hedonic life”. The others are the “engaged life”, where a person is absorbed by what they are doing, and the “meaningful life”, where you serve something bigger than yourself. Concentrating on these, Seligman is trying to move modern psychology away from correcting a person’s weaknesses and toward maximizing their strengths.

Money talk

In 2000, Kentucky forklift driver Mark Metcalf was struck by the kind of luck most can only dream of. Metcalf won a $US34 million lottery jackpot, sweeping him from near-poverty to rarified financial heights. In a statement announcing his rags-to-riches tale, he said he planned to move to Australia. “I’m going to totally get away,” he said.

Three years later, Metcalf was dead. His first wife had sued for child support, while a former girlfriend swindled $US500,000 while he was drunk. In the end, Metcalf died of complications related to alcoholism, while his second wife, Virginia Merida – they were separated when he won and shared the jackpot, divorcing a year later – was last year found dead in her bed, her body partly decomposed.

“Any problems people have,” Merida’s brother, Robert, told The New York Times, “money magnifies it so much it’s unbelievable.”

So many of us believe money will make our problems disappear. We rail at millionaires and think: “All I want is $US50,000! It’s nothing to you but would change my life!” Yet study after study shows happiness has only a tenuous link to money, probably because many people use wealth in the pursuit of the wrong type of happiness, the hedonic type. Will a new television really make me happy? Would a luxury vacation cure depression? And why is the buzz from pure pleasure so fleeting?

“It’s like French vanilla ice cream: the first taste is great, the second taste is 50 per cent as good as the first, and by the third taste, it’s cardboard,” Seligman says. “What I want to say is we’ve squandered our wealth. We’ve spent most of our wealth on trying to increase the hedonic part of our lives – pleasure as a positive emotion – and that’s not doable, not doable biologically.

“We bought a new dishwasher and for the first two loads of dishes it made me feel really good. Now I only notice if it breaks. The only thing my dishwasher can now bring me is anger and discontent. And that is the way of the hedonic life.

“There are strong biological limitations on the pleasant life. But I think when we spend our wealth as our parents did – on more engagement and more meaning – that’s the way around the Easterbrook paradox.”

The “Easterbrook paradox” is named after writer Gregg Easterbrook, whose book The Progress Paradox: How life gets better while people get worse (Random House, 2004) examined the disconnect between wealth and happiness. Seligman’s solution is to concentrate on introducing more engagement and meaning into your life, and it’s a notion that applies to companies as much as individuals. His patients undertake an analysis of their strengths, a test available on his website that identifies what makes you tick. Tapping into that can help increase what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow” – those times when you are completely absorbed in what you’re doing.

“The amount of meaning and engagement you have are vastly more important than the amount of positive emotion you have,” Seligman says. “There is reason to believe that productivity follows very similar laws to life satisfaction. That is, it’s related to the amount of meaning you have at work, to the amount of absorption and flow you have at work, and, to a lesser extent, the amount of positive emotion you have at work. That means to me that, if you’re a manager, what you want to be doing is attending very carefully to how much meaning and purpose your employees have. You want to be designing what they do every day to have more engagement, more flow, more time-stopping. And you also want to think about how much positive emotion there is on the job.”

Positive spin

Putting it more radically, Seligman believes corporations have tried the same techniques as many parents and therapists. “The idea is that if you can find all the things your employees are doing wrong and you can beat them into correcting those things, you get high productivity and high retention and high job satisfaction,” he says. “I’m saying that’s not true.”

There are promising signs. Employees have been increasingly demanding, and receiving, more flexible work hours, and there seems to be greater recognition that happiness equals productivity. Seligman agrees there’s “something in the air, but for all of my life, much of my nation’s industries have been centered around hedonic principles”.

Seligman says he’s not a puritan. “I’m all for vanilla ice-cream and Lexuses and things like that,” he insists. “But I know enough to know that it’s not going to increase national well-being.”

Of course, achieving that is easier said than done. As the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein noted: “I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.” It often seems easier to embrace unhappiness as life’s near-perpetual state, especially when there always seems to be someone more successful than you. It is, Seligman believes, a consequence of what he calls “the Pleistocene brain”.

“The brain that survived the Ice Age is not a brain that thinks, ‘What a beautiful day it is today! It’s going to be beautiful tomorrow,’” he says. “It’s a brain that thinks, ‘It’s a nice day today but there’s a glacier coming.’

“It’s the default of the tongue to swish around your mouth and find a cavity, to find something wrong, and then worry it. The default is not to find a really nice tooth and caress it. The uphill battle is re-educating attention and memory and consciousness to be more aware of the positive side of life.”

Published by AFR BOSS, February 2006.